In what may yet prove a knockout blow, Mitt Romney swept to victory in Florida on Tuesday with a huge 46% of the popular vote in Florida. Ask any SNP member how a big a share of the vote 46% is and they will tell you in no uncertain, glowing terms.

Given that no US President has won re-election with unemployment levels higher than 7.2% (current rate is ~8.5%), perhaps we should get used to seeing Mitt’s face in the papers, despite “having second place stamped through him like a stick of rock”.

We shall wait and see of course but a blue-blooded special relationship of Romney & Cameron will make Clinton & Blair look positively socialist by comparison.

The Tory/Republican/Tea Party/Libertarian (pick a branch, it’s the same tree) argument goes that people know best where to put their money and that open markets allow for capital to be allocated in the most efficient way for the greater good. Oh really?, I say. Oh really!?

Let’s take a few examples of why this is a wrongheaded approach to how to run a society:

– Much of the money made from huge incomes goes into second homes (or third, fourth, fifth etc) as this is one of the safest ways to guarantee a stable return on your cash and also ensures that wealth is kept within the family. The adverse knock-on impact of this is threefold – (1) the rich get richer and so the equality gap widens, (2) house prices increase (as more houses are held by fewer and fewer people) so people struggle to get onto a housing market that is the primary route for ensuring a decent pension and (3) the economy falters as money is being taken out of business and put into personal property portfolios. Low interest rates may well be boosting credit but it is simultaneously slicing capital out of the economy. A tax on second homes, or the more radical approach (as adopted in Sweden) of banning people from owning second homes domestically, is worth a look but neither Cameron nor Romney will bring this forward.

– Linked to the above, lower corporation taxes, as both Romney and Cameron favour, is the quickest way to take money out of the economy and into the micro-economy of the super rich. Would banks be paying out such huge bonuses if they had an extra few percent of tax to pay to the Government which, in turn, would help safeguard jobs in the public sector? One would hope not. There is a risk that small and medium sized businesses would have their lending cut to safeguard bonuses but that doesn’t mean that the three-pronged ideal of fair levels of Corporation Tax, minimal bonuses and high employment levels shouldn’t be the target.

– A recent example of what Mitt Romney spent his considerable income on is a $4m donation to the Mormon church. That is Mitt’s decision to make and I have nothing against Mormons of course, but the argument that people can direct capital better than Governments can for the betterment of society seems a little fanciful when this money, money that Mitt clearly doesn’t need, would arguably be better spent paying down the US debt or beefing up its economy. The same situation arises across the UK today from extra foreign holidays being unnecessarily taken or a new German car sitting in the garage. Disposable incomes feed the UK cash cow’s flabby underbelly that desperately needs milked.

– Train fares have increased 6%, rents have increased 4% (12% in London incidentally), food costs have increased 36%, public sector salaries have increased 0% and directors’ salaries have increased, wait for it, 50%. Where is the fairness there? Where is the progressive realignment of wealth? Will Cameron and Romney save us from this madness? Doubtful.

So, will Scotland be a buttress against this rather bleak regressive future? I am concerned that it won’t be. We’ve seen Alex Salmond slap down John Mason for merely suggesting that an independent Scotland could raise the top rate of the tax but the First Minister gleefully backed Sir Fred Goodwin on taking over ABN Amro. We’ve seen rail fares rise in Scotland just as much as they scandalously have in England & Wales, and we are seeing worrying signs over an SNP approach to fiscal control.

Alex Salmond is making control of Corporation Taxes his party’s prime argument as it pushes for the full range of financial levels for Scotland. That would be good news if Scotland intended to hold Corporation Tax rates in place, or raise them even, rather than copy or undercut the reduction in rates that George Osborne is currently presiding over.

The other argument that the SNP is keen to make is that Scotland can still build a fortune off the back of the oil that sits under the North Sea, despite clear evidence that the already drilled oiled reserves that sit above ground is more than enough to get us by while we wean ourselves off the black stuff. It’s a dilemma for Scotland, for sure – make a fortune off the drilling and burning of oil that the world doesn’t need and certainly can’t take or leave the oil where it is and be poorer for it financially but morally better off?

It would be a shame if the normally pleasingly principled SNP were to abandon reason and logic as the referendum drew nearer, if a rationale of ‘why shouldn’t we burn our oil if everyone else is’ will hold sway.

On top of this even, we have the much-boasted Council Tax freeze that still has another four years to go, despite the pennies dropping across Scotland that this is a regressive move as it is the richest who save the most. How is that driving Scotland forwards? As Kezia Dugdale MSP quite reasonably asks the Scottish Government, on behalf of the 80,000 unemployed 18-24 year olds, where are the jobs?

In his Hugo Young lecture, Salmond promised Scotland would be a ‘progressive beacon’ but I don’t see how that can be equated with an oil burning, low tax economy, particularly against a potential backdrop of UK-US relations revolving around Romney, Cameron and Osborne.

Perhaps the only way for Scotland to wriggle out of this depressing destiny is to vote Yes to independence and then swiftly vote a truly social democratic, progressive Labour/Green coalition into place?

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“But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness“ Leviticus 16:10

Though, of course, both Simon Hester and Sir Fred Goodwin were chosen by the lot of having been in charge of RBS at some point. One up to the fall, and one after. And like the proverbial bovine both the fankle of Simon Hester’s bonus last week and the government turning Fred Goodwins umbrella inside out (HT to Peat Worrier for that exclusive footage) are barely even symbolically important. Many people in the banking industry are still Sir CDO. Many more are still raking in enormous amounts of money in short term bonuses that severely distort the incentives within the financial industry and then leak into the real economy through exploiting genuinely useful financial instruments such as commodity futures to such an extent that hundreds of thousands of people are pushed into hunger because of pinstriped castles in the sky.

The ongoing financial catastrophe of the last four and a half years are not the fault of two Chief Executives of one company, one of whom wasn’t even employed there until after the crash. It was a systemic failure of the global financial system, particularly in the US and the UK but also around Europe and what was once broadly described as “the Free World” or “the West” and if you’re of a more right-on view point your probably currently refer to as “the Global North”. Not only that, but it was the latest and largest in a series of failures in the dominant political economy of the prior 40 years that stretches back past the current sovereign debt crisis (which is really just the second act of the 2007-2008 crisis) and finds echoes in the Enron and Worldcom scandals and the Argentine Default of the early 2000s, the Long-Term Capital Management debacle and the Russian default of the late 1990s, the Asian crisis prior to that, the Savings & Loans crisis in the US in the 1980s and 1990s and so an ad nauseam.

Obviously with such a broad sweep of crises a huge number of different, conflicting factors played into them. However they also all fundamentally grew from an uncompromising and unyielding faith in the market fundamentalist economic consensus articulated by Hayek and the Chicago School. Sometimes markets work. Sometimes they don’t. Problems arise when they are allowed unchecked and unfettered reign. Problems which cause huge social dislocation, uprooting people, throwing people on the scrapheap before their lives really started and killing people – and that was when they were functioning as designed. Since then they have became utterly dysfunctional even within their own frame of reference, requiring massive public subsidies, three am shotgun mergers and the world staring into an economic abyss so bad I’ve run out of cliches to describe it.

So, on the one hand, we have the worst financial crisis in human history causing untold damage and on the other hand we have the small matter of catastrophic global climate change which is inexorably moving closer and we appear to be increasingly incapable of doing anything about it, partly because of the financial crisis taking up a lot of both monetary and political capital.

But never mind, some guy who was only ever really a cog in the machine in the great scheme of things is going to have to spend five minutes changing the title drop down on his online banking. Whoop.

Margo MacDonald’s Assisted Suicide (Scotland) draft was published last week. The same day a woman I’d known all my life died after a condition she’d had since her teens finally deteriorated to a terminal state. She was one of the strongest, bravest, bawdiest people I’ve had the privilege to know. I’m not going to enumerate her suffering here because, frankly, it’s not relevant. She was great, everyone who knew her was a better person for doing so.  What is relevant is her determination to maintain control over her life.

I don’t just mean the choice to live or die here, I mean control over every aspect of life. What the home helpers did, when they came, what they cooked (I discovered at her farewell that a book of offal cookery I’d given her was appreciated by everybody but the people charged with trimming chicken livers), the relationship they had with her wasn’t a bureaucratic one. It was a personal one.

I don’t know what the end was like for her. She’d experienced things I actually can’t describe. She’d been fighting for decades. There are many people like her. People who know what’s happening to them.

Who are we to deny them? What right does any of us have to say “no, you must suffer indignity and incapacity”?

My friend didn’t chose that way. She literally fought until her dying breath. It’s not for her that I write this.

It’s for me.

My disabilities aren’t life limiting. I will hopefully get old, my body will fail and, when the time comes as it does to all of us I will die.

I don’t know if I can be as brave as my friend. When my mind fails, when my body gives in and there’s clearly no way back I want my love ones around me followed by an armful of morphine.

“To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.  Death of one’s own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses:  so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.”  – Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man

Today’s announcement from the SNP includes a significant piece of information regarding how First Minister Alex Salmond intends to run the forthcoming referendum – the question to be posed. That question is as follows:

“Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?”

I personally think it is a terribly worded question to be asking, far too open to misinterpretation. As many on the unionist side are keen to point out, how independent is Scotland if it shares a monarchy, currency and defence force with England? Does this question ask if we want to draw the line inside or outside of these issues?

So, for me, there is one obvious answer to that question and it isn’t no and it isn’t yes, it is ‘define independence’.

We can’t go into such an important decision as this with so much confusion hanging over what the question means and, to be honest, I fear the SNP is giving itself a bit of a handicap here because there may well be Scots who would be keen to vote Yes to Salmond’s original question regarding ‘negotiating a settlement with the UK’ but will decide to vote No to the above. The question paints a Scotland as too isolationist, too much like the Norways and the Icelands who sit outwith the European Union rather than a Scotland that is inclusive and seeking to be a part of the British isles and a part of Europe at large.

There must be a way to ask the necessary question while making it clear that currency and monarchy will, at least in the short term, be shared.

There is a reason why Ladbrokes are offering a massive 9/1 on Scotland being independent from England by the end of the decade. After all, Scotland could vote Yes in 2014 and the bookies could still have a strong argument for not paying out.

First Minister Alex Salmond will have the attention of the world’s press today as he outlines his party’s referendum plans that will lead us up to a 2014 plebiscite.

Today we will hear nothing that we haven’t heard before and many, many soundbites that we have but it is, nonetheless, a famous day for Scotland, not just for the SNP.

The publication of a white paper on an independence referendum had its importance exaggerated in the 2007-2011 term but with a Nationalist majority in the Parliament ensuring easy passage for whatever plans Salmond puts forward today, coupled with an emasculated coalition Government down South, the hand of history is certainly upon us.

The positioning is pleasingly already coming to an end. The Electoral Commission question has been ceded by the SNP and the 16-17 argument and Devo Max additional question will surely follow by also falling by the wayside and, in return, there will be no legal confusion over the holding of the referendum in 2014, despite the current token resistance from Westminster. All that is left is the question, a question that the SNP has already proposed and I don’t see why the final wording won’t be too dissimilar to that. Certainly the argument that the pro-UK side should take the Yes side of the answer has been straightforwardly dispelled. So we’re good to go and have the best part of 32 months to make our decisions.

As someone who was on the receiving end of the line ‘you can’t build an economy with shortbread and whisky’ last night, I have to admit that I am allowing my imagination to run away with itself a little bit about what today could bring. I have no qualms, as I might have had before, to let on to work colleagues that I’m very much in the Yes camp. After all, do we aspire to be the equal of Yorkshire, Cornwall and Northumberland, or the equal of Norway, Ireland and Finland?

It is the reaction to today that I am most looking forward to though, for therein lies the answer to what kind of referendum debate we are going to have. It is no coincidence of course that it is Burns Day today, so one hopes that the responses will be more poetic than prosaic. Labour may prick our collective unionist consciences with a romantic tale of British camaraderie, Lib Dems may reawaken the slumberous giant that is federalism, the Tories may wreak rhetoric in selling a dubious happy clapitalism and the Greens can paint a picture of a cleaner, healthier tomorrow.

From today the nation is back to being a blank canvas again, a post-Darien construct that knows not yet where it should turn. Alex Salmond will try to lead the way but is he our nation’s pastor or just a Tam O’Shanter? We don’t have ‘too’ long to find out I suppose.